


The Cries of the Forgotten

by phansparent (lestershoweller)



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Angst, Character in a coma, Coming of Age, Fluff, Getting Together, Homophobia, Language, M/M, grappling with sexual identity, mentions of substance addiction and overdose, scenes of a sexual nature (nothing explicit)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-17
Updated: 2015-10-17
Packaged: 2018-04-26 17:49:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5014225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lestershoweller/pseuds/phansparent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dan was never been a happy person, and he had never felt there was much point to his existence. Four weeks from heading off to uni, uninspired by the field of law that he knew he’d be entering, he starts to remember a friend he had in childhood named Phil. The visions of him are striking, and it seems Phil is trying to speak to him, although Dan’s parents swear Phil never existed. Before uni, Dan needs to know if Phil is real, and he needs to know there is more to his life than there has been in the past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Cries of the Forgotten

**_2003_ **

Dan zigzagged across the pavement, leaving black scuffs on the toes of his trainers as the tarmac began to melt in the beating sun of the hot September day. His brown curls bobbed up and down, smacking him in the forehead as he chased Anthony across the playground. Anthony had stolen the Fruit Roll-up Dan had kept saved in his jacket pocket for break. Anthony was Dan’s new friend and in truth, Dan’s only friend, and it was likely that the only reason Anthony was Dan’s friend was because he had just moved to Wokingham over the summer. It’d been so long since Dan had had a friend, he’d almost forgotten the feeling of his heart thumping in his chest with a smile on his face and giggles falling from his mouth, rather than with gritted teeth and sickness in his stomach. He’d built up his running skills in the past few years avoiding the punches of his taunting classmates. His dimples hadn’t caved so deeply into his face since before he had entered primary school.

Anthony reached the grassy area beyond the pavement, and Dan increased his pace to a sprint. Checking on Dan’s progress, Anthony turned his head and was surprised to see him less than ten metres behind. Distracted, Anthony missed the rock on the ground ahead of him and stumbled, giving Dan the chance to catch him. Dan pressed his hand against Anthony’s shoulder with enough force to topple Anthony over, with Dan collapsing on top of him. They broke into giggles as they stared at each other, Dan tucked between Anthony’s legs. Anthony ripped open the Fruit Roll-up package and tore off a piece of the strawberry flavoured square.

“Give that back!” Dan shouted, digging his fingers into the flesh above Anthony’s hips.

Laughing, Anthony replied, “Make me.” He trapped the piece of fruit roll-up between his lips.

Sometimes at night when he was supposed to be sleeping, Dan would sneak into the lounge and hide behind the sofa and watch the films that his parents were watching. He noticed a trend in the movies they watched. The two main characters would get into a fight, and one character would tell the other to shut up, and the other would say, “Make me.” The first character would always respond by kissing the other. So, that was what Dan did. He wrapped his lips around the piece of fruit roll-up and let his lips touch Anthony’s.

Dan would be lying if he said he did it just to get his fruit roll-up back. Even at twelve years old, Dan knew that kissing was reserved for people he really liked, and he really liked Anthony. Sometimes when he made Anthony smile, Dan would feel this little flutter in his stomach. Anthony’s lips were warm and wet, and Dan wasn’t sure why everyone in films seemed to like kissing so much that they would fall over to continue doing it, but he didn’t dislike it either. He liked when they were close to each other, usually just tickling and poking, but this closeness was at a level he’d never experienced with anyone but family members, and it felt amazing.

Dan’s chin smacked into the grass as Anthony slid his body out from underneath Dan away from his kiss.

“What the hell dude?” Anthony shouted, pulling himself off the ground and backing away from Dan. His face scrunched like he’d been sucking on a lemon, and he scrubbed the back of his hand across his lips.

“What’s going on?” A teacher’s voice boomed as she ran towards them.

Dan’s stomach turned, the urge to be sick filling him, as the teacher grabbed him by the arm and pulled him up to his feet. Dan was used to this treatment by his teachers, often finding himself “in trouble” although he was clueless as to what he did, like the one time he asked if boys ever marry other boys. After seven years of school, he’d learned that there was something defective about him. Though he dealt with hateful comments and behavior from his peers daily, it seemed the teachers turned a blind eye to it, if they weren’t somehow blaming him for it.

_“You need to buy new clothing Daniel. Your shirts are so small, and if they were bigger, they wouldn’t be able to see your baby fat sticking out.”_

_“I know he tripped you, but that doesn’t mean you should be spitting at anyone.”_

_“Maybe if you sat a little quieter those kids would ignore you.”_

_“If you’re just nice to them, maybe they’ll stop.”_

Dan wasn’t surprised to be dragged by the arm by Ms. Whitaker, especially after Anthony yelled, “Dan kissed me. I didn’t want him to. Yuck!” He wasn’t surprised, but he couldn’t stop the heavy feeling in his chest or the lump in the back of his throat from forming. Hot tears pooled in the corners of his eyes, and he swallowed quickly to ward them away to no avail. They streamed from his eyes, catching on his lips and filling his mouth with the taste of salt. He would no doubt be reprimanded for crying soon, though he didn’t know whether it would be because boys don’t cry or because he was too old to cry.

Ms. Whitaker sat Dan in a chair outside the Headmaster’s office, under the watch of the secretary Mrs. Felter, who usually slipped Dan sweets and told him jokes, so he didn’t mind much staying with her. Ms. Whitaker entered the Principal’s office and shut the door behind them, and Dan assumed they would be calling his parents. Everyone knew that if the crow’s feet lines were visible at the corner of Ms. Whitaker’s eyes, it meant a call home.

As expected, after a few minutes, the door flung open, and Ms. Whitaker said, “Your mother is on her way. But we’re going to talk to you first without her.”

Dan gulped and rubbed at his bloodshot eyes, which had thankfully ceased their tear production. Entering the office, he picked the chair closest to the door to ensure the quickest getaway.

“We don’t tolerate this kind of behavior at this school,” Mr. Anderson explained. Dan didn’t know what he meant, but he nodded his head anyway.

“You will not  _kiss_ anymore  _boys_.”

The words kiss and boys came out like swear words, spit out of Mr. Anderson’s mouth like the chewed shells of sunflower seeds. Dan noticed that Mr. Anderson did not specify whether he should not be kissing boys at school or at all, but he understood it to be the latter. Thoughts spun through Dan’s head, and he could hardly process them. He wondered why he could not kiss a boy when Jenny Lastings kissed Robert Tucker last week, and all the teachers fawned over how _adorable_  it was. Dan’s temple throbbed, and he wished he could climb into his bed and cover his head with his pillow. He hated how adults never explained anything fully. They provided snippets and expected children to understand like their minds were replications of the adult minds. Dan wanted to scream that he was a living, thinking human with his own thoughts, and they couldn’t talk cryptically and expect him to know how to make himself into what he needed to be. He didn’t want to ask either because they’d only think he was more stupid than they already thought him to be. They didn’t understand that his bad grades on tests were a product of his inability to concentrate on their boring drabble everyday, when he could learn everything they were saying from books.

They pushed Dan out of the office after a few more minutes of lecturing, sitting him again in the secretary’s area. His mother arrived after he’d counted 145 of the ceiling tiles. She was shuffled into the principal’s office, with Dan left to wonder what they were saying behind the closed door. Glancing over at it, Dan devised a plan. Mrs. Felter’s desk was pressed against the wall of the Headmaster’s office, while Dan’s chair was on the other end of the room. If he chattered with Mrs. Felter, he could potentially hear what they were saying.

He smiled at his own cleverness and waltzed up to Mrs. Felter’s desk. “Hi Mrs. Felter. I’m sorry, it was so rude of me to sit in here without asking you how your day has been today,” he said with a smirk, proud of how easily he could mock maturity.

“I’m guessing you want some sweets,” Mrs. Felter countered, keeping her voice low enough that no one inside the Headmaster’s office would hear.

Dan grinned, making sure it was the type of smile that showed off his dimples. Adults tended to adore his dimples, and he could often use them to get what he wanted from them. It was the other children that Dan needed to hide his dimples from, learning an entirely different way to smile to avoid their taunts that dimples were girly. But what about Dan didn’t they refer to as girly? There was his curly hair and his high-pitched voice and his quickness to tears and his less-than-fondness for sports.

“Sweets would be nice, I guess” he said with a shrug.

Mrs. Felter pulled open the bottom drawer of her desk, bending down to reach to the back of it to find where her sweets were hidden. Using this distraction as an opportunity, Dan leaned as close to the wall as possible and closed his eyes, hoping to increase his ability to hear.

“He kissed him?” Dan heard his mother ask.

“On the lips,” Ms. Whitaker grunted back.

“Oh my.”

“Has Daniel done anything before that made you think he might be gay?” The Headmaster asked.

Dan missed his mother’s response because Mrs. Felter popped back up from below the desk with a few different flavours of lollies _._ He grabbed the grape flavoured one, unwrapped it and stuck it in his mouth. Unprepared to give up his prime listening spot, he scanned the desk for something feasible to turn his attention to. His eyes were drawn to the cup holding at least twenty-five pens, and he reached towards a bright red one that stuck out among the mostly black and white ones.

He pulled the lolly from his mouth and said, “I collect pens.” It was a lie, but Mrs. Felter wouldn’t know.

“Well, take it if you want. I’ve got plenty!” Mrs. Felter smiled as she spoke, words soothing to Dan’s ears.

“Thanks,” Dan replied, turning the pen over in his hands. “Lester’s Plumbing” was written along the pen in white lettering, with a phone number below it. His hand tingled as he touched it, and for a moment, a flash of blue filled his brain.

“Are you alright dear?” Mrs. Felter asked. 

Dan nodded, though he could hear the sound of his blood pumping in his temples.

“Well, I don’t appreciate it!” Dan heard his mother shout. But a few seconds later, the Headmaster’s door creaked open, and Mrs. Howell darted out. She grabbed Dan’s hand, instructing, “We’re going home now,” and they hurried toward the door.

“Can I go to the bathroom first?” Dan asked as they passed the door.

“Of course honey,” Mrs. Howell assured, running a hand through her son’s tight curls. 

Dan made a show of ruffling his hair back into the carefully crafted disarray he had arranged it in that morning before turning on his heel and entering the bathroom. He surveyed the inside, knowing from past experience it wasn’t in his best judgment to pee at a urinal if certain kids were in there, but he was pleased to find it was empty. After relieving himself, he walked to sink, taking longer than usual to clean his hands as they were coated with dirt from his fall earlier. He stared at his face in the mirror, prodding his puffy cheeks and wondering what it was about him that was so undeserving of more than temporary happiness.

“Fatty,” he mouthed and reached his hand up to the mirror to cover his face, resisting the urge to punch it and shatter the glass, so he didn’t have to look at it anymore. But of course, he was too much of a wimp for that just like everything else.

“My mum says all bodies are beautiful.”

The voice reminded Dan of the sound the ocean makes as it washes up on the shore, a sound that always lulled Dan to tranquility and sleep, but he wasn’t expecting anyone to be behind him. His heart jumped into his throat, as he removed his hand from the mirror to see a boy about his age. His hair was brown, but lighter than Dan’s, and it was pin straight, and Dan wanted to exchange it for his. The boy had crinkled eyes, squeezed so close together that Dan was shocked he could see. Still, Dan caught a hint of the color behind his lids: bright blue.

Dan spun around to face him. “Who are you?”

“I’m Phil! I saw you in the Headmaster’s office, and I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“Why?”

Dan had never seen Phil before in school, but anyone who he had never seen before was as good as his enemy he supposed. He hadn’t been able to keep a friend for more than a few weeks, so he doubted that any person, no matter how cute his squinty eyes and sideways smile were would be any different.

“I know how it feels to be sad. No one likes me either.” Phil looked at his shoes, digging his toe into the tiles.

Dan felt a pang in his chest. “Well, maybe we can be friends then. I’m Dan.”

Phil smiled, and it was the kind of smile that reminded Dan of the reason he kept trying to find happiness even though he always ended up with dirt thrown in his face.

“I’d like that!”

“Well, I’ve gotta go meet my mom, but I’ll see you around, yeah?” Dan asked.

“I’ll find you during break tomorrow, okay?” 

Dan smiled, not a fake smile but one where his dimples showed. “Okay.”

When Dan was older, he’d recall this day as the last day of his childhood he could remember. Everything else existed only as fragments and blurs, and in none of those did he ever see Phil again, at least not for a very long while.

* * *

**_2010_ **

Dan punched the numbers into the register, the drawer popping open for Dan to place the customer’s money and count out her change. “£2.40 is your change. Stop by again soon.” By four in the afternoon of an eight hour shift, Dan’s jaw always hurt from fake smiles. If he thought about it long enough, he realized that on most days his jaw hurt from fake smiles. Dan used to count the number of times he fake smiled a day, but after awhile, it became more efficient to count the number of real smiles each day.

No one writes “I want to be a cashier” as their aspiration when they’re asked all through primary school what they want to be when they grow up, but someone had to work at the grocery shop, at least until checkouts were completely overtaken by computers. In theory, Dan wouldn’t be working in the shop for the rest of his life. It was just a job that was the first step towards the career his mum kept insisting he would have one day. But careers required university and university required money that neither Dan nor his family had, and so he was in the shop, working six days a week, raising the money he needed to head to university.

Dan thought it would be fun to take a gap year: an entire year off of school in which all his time could be dedicated to Guitar Hero and Final Fantasy. Yet, even though he hadn’t liked his friends that much when he’d had them, he still didn’t like not having them. On some of his days off, Dan forgot the sound of his own voice. In the mornings, he’d wake up feeling like bugs were crawling inside his body, and he tossed and turned in his bed trying to fall back to sleep and forget the emptiness of each coming day, but his restlessness would not remit. 

It was almost over though. By some miracle, Dan had been accepted to University of London, and he’d made enough money to pay for it for the most part, though he’d probably be tending cash registers while the rest of his peers were out getting trashed on Friday evenings for the entire four years. For all of the talk about careers that his parents had done with him, he was still no closer to determining which was the right career for him. On the worst nights, he stared at the ceiling for hours, wondering why he was put on the earth to be such a purposeless individual. He reasoned that he’d figure it out when he got there, but his parents had been talking enough about their new young lawyer neighbor for him to know they had their expectations. He knew he’d end up in uni studying law and pretending he chose it on his own.

Another woman, probably in her seventies, approached the counter, placing her basket of groceries in front of Dan. As he scanned her items, he looked over at her wrinkled hands clasped together and noticed the lack of a wedding ring on her finger. He wondered if she’d manage to finish her milk and eggs before their expiration dates, thinking she must live alone. His chest ached, and he cursed her a little less in his head when she pulled out her chequebook to pay the £53.75 that she owed him. Luckily, it was a Monday morning, which meant his only customers were stay-at-home mums and the elderly, so the woman’s carefully crafted script on the cheque wasn’t backing up a line at his register.

Once he completed the complicated procedure to input a cheque into the cash register, he handed the woman her receipt and her bags. She wasn’t more than a few steps away from the register when Dan noticed she’d left her pen laying on the counter.

“Ma’am!” Dan called, but he figured her hearing wasn’t good enough to hear him because she walked out of the store unawares.

Dan had no motivation to follow after her, and if he was honest, he was glad she’d left it behind. The pen was beautiful: silver on the tips with a multicoloured design much like paint splattering over the rest of it. He uncapped it and practiced writing his name. The ink slid across the paper like butter, and he brought the page up to his nose and sniffed the ink. There was something about ink on paper that Dan loved. There was something about pens in general that Dan loved, and he could trace it back to that day in the Headmaster’s office when he borrowed that pen from Mrs. Felter. His lie had somehow become a truth, and he had boxes full of pens collected throughout his life: some borrowed and never returned to classmates, some pilfered from coffeehouses and hotel lobbies and restaurants, and some left behind by absent minded customers. He wrote stories with them, stories about where they came from and who owned them before him. That was why he never bought his pens; they always fell into his hands by some other path. Whenever he gripped a pen between his fingers, the stories would just come to him, flash through his head like they were his own memories.

His former customer appeared in his head, much younger than he had seen her today. Her short grey hair was shoulder-length and blond, and she reached up to brush the curls falling into her face as she sat at the dinner table across from a brunet man. He was still dressed in his collared shirt and tie, a pen tucked into the pocket, which Dan recognized as the one in his own hand.  The woman reached her left hand into the middle of the table, continuing to spoon soup into her mouth with her right hand. The man peered up from his bowl and grinned at her. It wasn’t a jawbreaking grin, just a small raise of the corners of his lips, but it said contentment; it said everything was right in the world. He reached his hand to the middle of the table and laid his on top of hers, and they kept their hands clasped for the remainder of the meal.

Dan’s lips curled up into a smile as well. He liked when his brain created the happy stories. Other stories showed him lonely people wanting for human connection their whole lives. Even if she was alone now, he was happy she’d had someone she loved once. He figured old age alone wasn’t too bad if at one time your heart could barely be contained in your chest, pumping so strongly for one other person.

Dan used to pretend that he felt that way about Emily. He used to lie to himself and say that he could die happily knowing she was the last person he loved. At first he didn’t realize how lonely he felt with her in his arms. He couldn’t pinpoint the name of the emptiness in his chest or the turning of his stomach. But even when “I love you” felt false on his tongue, he didn’t end it, even though he suspected she felt the same. They both waited until she left for uni in London, so neither of them had to say that they never really loved each other the way they pretended to.

Dan pulled his phone out of his pocket and checked the time. His shift was over in twenty minutes, and he was all too ready for it. He did enjoy the happy tales he concocted, but they also made him wonder whether he would ever be so lucky as to experience the same. Not that he felt he needed a romantic partner, but he wanted to love something. He wanted more than a bearable life.

 His replacement showed up, and he fiddled around in the break room for a few minutes so he could clock out at the correct time. The moment he stepped out the door, he popped an earbud into his ear and hoped the sounds of Taking Back Sunday could drive away his brooding thoughts.

* * *

“Dan have you even started packing?”

Dan turned to see his mother leaning against his door frame. “Yes.”

It was almost true. He’d opened up his wardrobe and begun to poke around in it, deciding what items were worth bringing with him to uni. He was relatively certain he couldn’t pack the Winnie the Pooh stuffed toy his nan had given him when he was born, even though there were still some nights where he dug Pooh out of his home in the wardrobe to cuddle with. Behind Pooh, he discovered an old shoebox, filled with some of the first pens he’d collected in his childhood. He couldn’t resist dipping his hand into the box, fumbling through it until a vision overtook him.

His hand scribbled into his notebook, the blue ink smearing across his pinky. He feared he might rip through the page, as he attempted to commit the images to paper before they left him. The images had never come at him with such urgency before. His images never screamed at him to listen. They never said his name. 

The image was nothing more than a face, a blurred face with tufts of black hair falling into his wide eyes, eyes that felt like they were glaring at Dan, even though they were in his imagination. Dan felt the racing blood in his body, pumping loudly in in his ears. He wasn’t scared. The staring eyes weren’t menacing but sad, glazed over like someone whose tears never stop. His eyes were airport eyes, the ones you had when you watched someone you love leave for a long trip. They were sunk deep into his skull, or maybe it was just an illusion from the swollen skin beneath his eyes.

“Help,” he whispered.

That was when Dan’s mother had showed up at the door. Dan slammed his notebook shut and shoved it underneath his pillow. His mother tended to get nervous when she saw Dan mid-writing, his eyes glazed over and his pen tearing across the page. He didn’t know if it was because she was afraid he’d choose an insufficient career in writing or she was afraid of what he could be thinking.

“Dan, you have four weeks until you leave, and we’ll be away at your grandparents for one of those weeks. You have to start getting your things together!”

Mrs. Howell’s voice seemed to only have two tones when talking to Dan lately–nagging and sickenly sweet–the latter of which was used to mask the fact that she was nagging. He knew it was because she believed he’d never make it to uni, even though she never said it. She’d watched as he avoided attending his classes, procrastinated on homework assignments, and failed tests he would have aced with a few hours worth of studying. It wasn’t that Dan wasn’t smart, or even that he was lazy; those things just didn’t matter to him, and his mother despised that. She had a doctoral degree in Philosophy and taught at the local uni, though she never let anyone forget that she could be teaching at Cambridge or Oxford if she hadn’t wanted to have a family instead. On bad days, her whining sounded a lot like regret that she had a family, or maybe just regret that she had had Dan.

“Okay, okay!” Dan shouted, jumping off his bed and hurrying over to his wardrobe again.

He pulled a few shirts off the rack, separating them into piles of “bring” or “donate.” He separated until his mother stopped glaring at him, turning on her heel and heading back to the kitchen. Rolling his eyes, he shut the bedroom door she’d neglected to close. Even though it felt like something out of a music video, Dan spun around, leaned his head against the door, and sunk onto the floor. His head still felt cloudy from his visions of the sallow-skinned man.

Dan was certain he’d never seen the man, but he felt his brain searching for his image, trying to explain why he seemed familiar. Squeezing his eyes shut, he tried to make his face appear again, but the image was blurred. He needed to touch the pen again, to see if the same face appeared again. He pushed himself off the floor and launched himself at his bed, searching for where it had rolled after his panic from his mother’s appearance. It had, of course, wedged itself between one of the legs of the bed and the wall. He reached down and pulled it out, the face appearing again in only a few seconds.

“Remember me, Dan,” he said. 

A bit spooked, Dan dropped the pen back into the box with the rest of his collection. He’d always known there was something a bit strange about the way he experienced the inspiration for his writing. No other writer he’d met could concoct entire worlds by touching an object. He never felt like he was thinking when he had them; they flowed through him without interruption. He never had to stop to rephrase or redescribe because the words were already formed perfectly. Dan had figured his brain worked differently from other people’s, but he’d never considered how different. For the first time, he considered whether his visions were real things that had once happened. It made his stomach feel sick.

The thing about his visions though, was that he’d never been able to edit them. He’d never been able to see the garden out back if the vision took place in the kitchen. He couldn’t ask the people he saw to turn a bit to the right so he could better see the shape of their noses. He’d tried to talk to the people in his visions thousands of times. So, why, after years of screaming into the void, was his vision the one doing the talking?

* * *

**_2003_ **

“Dan, do you have any dirty laundry?” his mother called up the stairs.

Dan swiped a hand over his wet eyes, removing the traces of the tears that hadn’t stopped since he’d made it into his bedroom after school. It hadn’t taken long for the news of Dan kissing Anthony to spread around. Anthony wedged his way into the groups of boys at school who had always tortured Dan, and Dan hadn’t been prepared by how much more  _painful_  it would be to have someone he cared for abandon his friendship in favor of ridiculing him. Pinching the skin on his wrist underneath his desk was the only mechanism to keep him from crying during the school day, an action that would not have improved the treatment he received.

Dan hopped off his bed and scanned the floor around his bed, which he tended to use as a hamper more than he used his actual hamper. He picked up a pair of his jeans, digging his hand into the pockets to avoid the wrath of his mother if another pack of gum went through the washing machine. Pulling out the contents, he recognized the pen he’d cleverly acquired from Mrs. Felter a few days before in the Headmaster’s office. He placed the pen on his bedside table before picking up a few items and tossing them into the hamper stuffed inside his wardrobe.

“I’m bringing it down!” Dan shouted, hoping his mother didn’t notice the cracking of his voice. He dragged the basket down the stairs into the laundry room as quickly as possible, anxious to return to his moping.

As soon as he entered his bedroom he heard, “Don’t freak out.” There was a boy sitting on the edge of his bed, the same boy from the bathroom. 

“How’d you get in here?” Dan asked, shutting the door behind him to mask the sounds of him speaking to someone.

The boy laughed, and Dan noticed that he jutted the tip of his tongue out of the corner of his mouth when he laughed. Despite the fact that this boy had apparently broken into his bedroom, the sight made Dan smile.

“I’m not really here,” the boy said.

“I can literally see you.”

The boy smirked. “But can you touch me?”

Dan raised an eyebrow, but he approached the boy. He reached out a hand and placed it on his shoulder, but although he could see his hand resting on it, he felt nothing beneath his hand. “What the–”

“I’m not even really sure. It’s never been like this for me before,” he explained. 

Dan sat next to him. “What are you talking about…Phil, right?”

He nodded. “I can kind of, read people’s minds.” Phil looked up at the ceiling. “But like, I’ve never been able to talk to anyone before. I’ve never been able to sit on their bed or whatever.”

“Oh. That’s weird.”

Phil turned back to look at Dan. “Wait, you believe me?”

“I can’t think of a better explanation of how you got into my bedroom,” Dan explained. “And, I guess I have a weird thing too. I never thought it was anything, but maybe it’s why I can see you.”

“What is it?”

“Sometimes I touch things, and then I can see into people’s lives.” Dan grabbed the pen off his nightstand and showed it to Phil. “Both times I’ve touched this, you appeared. 

“That’s a pen for my dad’s shop,” Phil said. “Where am I anyway?”

“Wokingham. A bit outside of Reading. Where are you from?”

“Manchester. Well, that’s where the shop is anyway. I’m really from Rawtenstall, but I doubt you’ve ever heard of that. Some pretty strange luck that it ended up so far south.”

Dan found it interesting that Phil used the term “strange luck.” Maybe he wasn’t certain yet whether he was glad to have found someone almost like him.

“And of all the pens that traveled hundreds of miles south, it was the one from the shop of the boy with almost the same gift as me.”

“What I have isn’t a gift.” Phil’s voice was sad, not on the verge of tears but just empty, lacking energy. He sounded tired. “You have some choice in your visions. I have no control over the things I hear. They come without warning. Good thoughts, bad thoughts. You can’t imagine what other people are really thinking.”

Dan wanted to ask Phil to elaborate, but the way his head was turned, eyes fixated out the open window, told Dan that Phil didn’t want to remember the things he’d heard. He examined Phil, braver when Phil couldn’t observe his glare. His skin was like porcelain, and Dan feared for a moment that he was nothing more than a ghost. He didn’t think ghosts would be so opaque though, or have such deep purple bruises painted on their skin. Dan wanted to ask about those as well, but there was something about the way Phil spoke that made him afraid to ask those questions, as if Phil’s porcelain skin would crack if he had to answer.

Staring at Phil made Dan’s stomach flutter. Despite being speckled white and blue, Phil was beautiful. Dan couldn’t remember ever using the word to describe anyone before, but nothing else seemed adequate for Phil. He wondered what it would take to keep Phil, to make sure he didn’t run away from him the way everyone else did.

“I should go,” Phil said, and Dan could feel the corners of his lips turn down. “Don’t worry,” Phil added, smiling with one side of his mouth. “I’ll be back again. Just touch the pen, and I’ll be there. Trust me, it’s much better here with you than there.”

Dan wasn’t sure what he expected would happen when Phil “disconnected” from him and returned home, but it still made him jump when Phil’s slowly became less opaque and faded out of the room. It didn’t help Dan’s fear that he had been speaking with a ghost.

* * *

**_2010_ **

Dan’s hair was plastered to his pillow when he woke, forming the corkscrew curls that he tried desperately to hide with his hair straighteners each morning. His dream had been so vivid, nothing like any dream he’d ever had. He remembered the butterflies in his stomach looking at Phil, the way his heart thumped. He remembered his entrancement with the sharp colors of Phil: the white of his skin, the blue of his eyes, the black of his hair, the red of his lips. He remembered wondering after Phil had disappeared how old the boy was, guessing he was at least a year or two older, and his heart beat faster than usual long after he was gone, intimidated by Phil but also feeling like Phil was the first person he’d felt truly comfortable with in his life.

Dan reached for his phone, checking the time to realize it was seven o’clock, two hours earlier than he usually woke up. He squeezed his eyes shut, but after several minutes of a churning stomach and racing thoughts, he accepted defeat by his restless mind. 

His mother almost dropped her mug of tea when she saw him sitting in the kitchen hovered over a bowl of Shreddies. “You’re up early.” Mrs. Howell had the tendency to use a tone that was cheerful but also indicated that she supposed there was some  _reason_  he was awake so early. Dan suspected she thought he had never gone to sleep.

“Couldn’t sleep. I had weird dreams,” Dan said, spooning Shreddies into his mouth.

The kitchen turned silent. Silence tended to prevail over sound in the Howell household, even more prevalent when Dan was in the room. Sometimes Dan would try to think back to the moment his family started treating him differently, but his childhood had always been a blur to him, which was what had made the dream even more bizarre.

“Did I have a friend named Phil when I was younger?”

This time Dan’s mother did drop the mug. “Shit,” she muttered under her breath, grabbing the dish towel hanging from the oven door as she bent down to mop up the puddle of tea. She pulled the pieces of ceramic out of the puddle, putting them into a pile to toss into the rubbage bin.

“I don’t remember any Phil,” his mother insisted, though the way her voice cracked on the name made Dan unsure whether he believed her.

Dan smirked. “Just a figment of my imagination I guess. 

Mrs. Howell dropped the fragment of glass clutched in her fingers.

* * *

Dan imagined that the attraction to men had something to do with the change in his parent’s attitude toward him. The funny thing – maybe not funny for his parents – was that the more he thought about his parents’ anger over his attractions, the more he wanted to act on them. His mother hadn’t said anything about his sexual orientation that morning, but her obvious lying had sparked the same spirit of defiance in Dan. Though, the blond tanned man winking at him at his grocery counter certainly enlivened the spirit as well.

The three years with Emily had left him craving to explore the bisexuality he’d been too ashamed to explore before Emily. When he was fifteen, he was still convinced if he rammed it into Emily enough times it’d stop him from searching for man on man porn nearly every time he masturbated. Older and wiser now, he preferred using his bisexuality to irritate his parents rather than hiding it from them to generate an inkling of approval from them. 

After his shift, in bed with the man – Jarred, Dan seemed to recall – Dan had another vision of Phil. The evening returned to him with such flashing speed, he couldn’t believe he’d forgotten before that moment, especially because it had been the moment he learned the word for his sexuality. Before, it had seemed like the idea of bisexuality had just floated into his mind. 

It had been a day much like the one when he’d first met Phil. The other kids at school hadn’t gotten over his kiss with Anthony – that day wouldn’t come until Mary Remington tripped in the front of the classroom and exposed her pants to everyone. He kept hearing that word repeated over and over to him, the one Headmaster Anderson had used to his mother: gay. He’d been wanting to look it up, but it seemed like every time he touched the keyboard of the computer, his parents or his brother were peering over his shoulder. But that afternoon he was finally alone.

* * *

**_2003_ **

He typed the word into Google – at that time ignorant of the existence of private browsing or deleting history so in all likelihood, his parents had discovered his inquiries – and was bombarded with results. He decided to review the dictionary definition, which he discovered later was much safer than pursuing gay.com.

_Sexually attracted to someone of the same sex._

The words hit Dan in the stomach first, like he’d swallowed a rock, and it had just now plummeted into his lower body. He’d only just turned twelve and only recently become accustomed to the intermittent hardening between his legs. He knew that boners meant you could have sex, and sure, he’d gotten them looking at other boys before, but he’d gotten them looking at girls too, and sometimes he got them when he wasn’t looking at anyone. Dan had never thought about the possibility that he was sexually attracted to men, even when he got those butterflies in his stomach around Anthony and other boys before him. He never considered he’d ever have sex with someone other than a girl because he knew that was how to make babies. He wasn’t even sure how two men had sex. 

What confused him more was why everyone around him was so concerned about whether or not he was gay, or how they seemed to decide he was when he hadn’t even known the meaning of the word. He supposed he’d heard before of two people of the same sex being together, though it never felt like an option. From the time he was little, his parents had made remarks about one day when he had a wife and children. He wondered why no one ever really talked about it. Why would someone make a word for it if it wasn’t a viable option?

He poked around some more online, avoiding the websites he suspected were porn and the dating websites. He learned the other word for gay, homosexual, and that it meant people who were solely attracted to the same sex. His stomach turned, and for a moment he worried he might throw up. It didn’t make sense for him to be gay; he liked girls too, even fantasized about putting his hands on Janie Garrison’s breasts, the biggest in year 8. But the first person he’d kissed had been a boy, and he wasn’t sure what that meant. Was he supposed to choose? And would choosing gay mean a lifetime of ridicule from everyone around him for a reason completely unknown to him? He needed to lie down.

He closed all of the windows he’d opened and struggled up the stairs to his bedroom, his heart pumping quickly against his ribcage, so loudly he could hear it. He threw himself on his bed, laid on his back, and closed his eyes. Reaching out with his left hand, he felt around on his nightstand for the pen, the pen that would bring Phil to him, hoping that he’d show up. Some days it would take a few tries throughout the day before Dan saw his black tufts of hair begin to appear, always the first thing to show.

“Hey Dan,” Phil said.

Dan peeked open an eye to see Phil seated next to his reclined body, legs dangling off the edge of the bed. He reached out his hand, and it hovered above Dan’s thigh for a second before he remembered that despite being able to see each other, they couldn’t touch each other. He pulled it away and swiped it through his hair. Dan was both disappointed and relieved – disappointed to be denied Phil’s comforting touch but relieved that he avoided the possibility of becoming overexcited by it.

“Hey,” Dan answered, not moving from his position.

“What’s the matter?”

For a moment he wondered if he should lie, but strangely, he didn’t feel afraid of confessing his search to Phil. And since Phil was more than a year older than him, he suspected he might know more about it than Dan did.

“Phil, do you know what being gay is?”

“Yeah. Why, are you gay?”

Dan felt his face flush. “I don’t know. I only just found out what it means. But it doesn’t seem to describe me all the way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well gay is liking guys right? But I don’t  _only_ like guys. And I always thought I’d end up with a girl. Never thought there was another option.”

“Maybe you’re bi.”

“What’s that?”

“Bisexual. You like boys and girls.”

Dan shot up from his lying position and looked at Phil. “That’s a thing?” 

Phil laughed. "Sorry, it was just cute how you brightened up all of a sudden. Yeah bi is a thing. I had a moment a lot like the one you’re having now, and my brother told me about it. And it seemed to fit for me.”

“So, you like boys and girls? Like you’d marry a boy?”

“Well, that’s not legal. But I would if I loved him, and I was allowed.”

His curiosity outweighed his embarrassment, and he asked, “How do boys have sex?”

Dan could tell Phil was trying not to giggle. “Well, some of them just do it up the butt.”

“What!”

Phil’s laughter broke through at Dan’s exclamation. “It’s not as bad as it sounds.” 

"Have you…?”

“Oh, no, but I got a bit curious and…” Phil blushed and made a curling motion with his finger to finish the sentence.

It was Dan’s turn to giggle. The nervousness in Dan’s stomach was all but gone now, as they turned their conversation to other things.

* * *

**_2010_ **

Dan didn’t like to do the classic “leave while the guy is sleeping next to you” routine, but his flashback had left his mind racing. At first he tried to lay his head down on the pillow and fall asleep, more content to deal with the awkwardness of the morning breakfast than to be a complete asshole, but he knew he couldn’t wait until morning to talk to his parents about Phil. There was no reasonable explanation Dan could concoct to explain how this person could have gained such lucidity in his mind if he did not exist, and if he did exist, Dan had no understanding of how Phil had come to not exist in his memory for almost seven years.

Dan checked his phone. It was nearing eleven, which meant he had little time to return home before his parents went to bed. He listened closely to Jarred’s breathing, which had been heavy for the past ten minutes, and Dan decided that if he wasn’t asleep now, he would never be. Pushing lightly off the mattress, Dan managed to right himself up on the floor. He bent down on his knees, sliding a hand across the carpet to recover his discarded clothing. Once he’d dressed himself, he sneaked out the front door, hoping he wasn’t leaving Jarred in any danger behind an unlocked front door. 

He was rather unathletic, so the speed he reached on the route home impressed him. It was a feat only possible because of his eagerness to learn about Phil and his terrible fear of the dark. When he was a kid, he wouldn’t cross the street alone in the dark, even when he was walking to his own house with a light on in the front window. Mrs. Weatherly across the street still told that story to the neighbors whenever Dan happened to walk by.

His mother was stirring honey into her tea in her dressing robe when he walked in. “Where’ve you been?” She said it with the sort of inflection in her voice that Dan knew meant she knew he’d been fucking someone.

“Put your mug down.”

“What?”

“I don’t want you to nearly drop it this time.” 

Mrs. Howell rolled her eyes, but she placed the cup on the counter. “For what have I earned the pleasure of this snotty attitude?”

“Do you know who Phil is?”

She smacked her head on her forehead as she sunk into a chair at the kitchen table. “Oh, not this Phil nonsense again. I told you I’ve never heard of anyone named Phil.”

“You’re lying. I’m having all of these memories of someone named Phil, and I never had them before. It’s like someone stole them away from me. And there’s no way I could just forget these things. I always wondered why my life when I was younger was such a blur. I used to think I just repressed it all because it was too painful because I was so alone and bullied and all that. But turns out I had a shining light in that time period in the form of Phil, and for some reason I forgot all about him. And there’s no way you didn’t know about him. So what happened to Phil?”

Dan could see tears welling up in the corner of his mother’s eyes. “Not again,” she muttered under her breath before racing towards the staircase and calling upstairs, “Richard! Come down here!”

“Now!” She added, when he didn’t immediately run out of the bedroom.

Dan hadn’t imagined that the explanation of Phil would be quite so dramatic. His father and mother entered the kitchen, and both sat at the table. Dan assumed his mother had informed his father of the topic of interest before they’d entered because his mouth was pressed in the same sharp line as Dan’s mother’s.

“Dan, we hoped you’d never remember anything about Phil. It hurt you so much when you were younger,” Dan’s father began. 

“What hurt me?” Dan asked. He’d been angry when he first started talking to his mother, but the anger had been replaced by anxiety. He wouldn’t be surprised if his parents told him that Phil had attempted to murder him with the solemn looks on their faces.

“Phil isn’t real, honey,” his mother continued off his father’s explanation. “You created him because things were so hard for you at school. He was just an imaginary friend, but he got out of hand. You kept saying he was a real, and that’s when we decided we had to send you to Dr. Paulson. You remember Dr. Paulson, right?” 

Dan’s legs felt suddenly wobbly, and he sat down at the table with his parents. He’d spent his life thinking his parents had sent him to therapy to knock the gay out of him, but they’d really been attempting to knock Phil out of him. He felt bad for them, something he hadn’t even realized was possible. They’d actually been worried about him, probably thought he was schizophrenic or something. He swallowed hard, as a gagging reflex made it’s way up his throat. Maybe he was. Maybe Phil wasn’t real. Maybe he’d always been hallucinating and now the hallucinations were coming back.

“Oh. I’m sorry for getting angry. I’m just going to go to bed.”

“Dan, are you okay? Are you seeing Phil again? Do you need to go back to a therapist? because we can make an appointment,” Mr. Howell asked, rising from his chair and placing a hand on his son’s shoulder.

“No, it’s just been memories. It’s probably nothing. But I promise I’ll tell you if it changes.”

He got up from his seat and went upstairs to his bedroom. Not bothering to turn on the light, he laid down on his bed. The memories seemed so real. He could almost feel the butterflies he’d had in his stomach when looking at Phil. And what about what happened when he touched the pen?

Dan reached out onto the bedside table where he’d left the pen that morning. Clasping it in his hand, he closed his eyes, willing the visions back. He held it tightly in his hand for more than a minute, but there was nothing, and he was about to place it back on the table and get accustomed to the fact he had a mental disorder when he heard the voice again.

“Dan. Help.”

The sound caused Dan to jump out of bed. He flipped on the light and grabbed his laptop off the floor. Opening the lid, he turned it on and clicked the Google Chrome icon to open a webpage. He typed Lester’s Plumbing into the search bar and found an address in Manchester. It was a 3 hour and 17 minute drive from Wokingham. 

Before he could process what he was doing he was researching rental cars. He had three weeks before university started, and he’d never done anything truly ridiculous in his life. He’d never been anywhere interesting in his life. He knew Phil was real, and he was going to prove he was real, and he was going to explore some of England on his journey to find out if he was real. He rented a car online for pickup the next morning, dipping into some of his university money, but he didn’t care. He was going to find Phil.

Dan’s parents were awake late into the night, presumably talking about him. He creeped around his bedroom using a flashlight keychain to pack his bag. He wasn’t sure how long he would be gone, not knowing how many cities he was going to stop in. Pulling a jumper off the shelf in his wardrobe, an object fell out, smashing on top of his foot. He bit down on his bottom lip, hoping he wouldn’t end up drawing blood in his effort to silence his agonized screech from his parents.

He bent down, gripping his toes in hand and rubbing out the pain, and with his other hand, surveying the floor to find the horrid object. It was an old Flip video camera he’d asked for at Christmas a few years before that he’d never used. He’d wanted to film himself, maybe put the videos up on YouTube. It was just going to be some videos of him talking, or playing Guitar Hero or DDR, but after a few attempts, he’d scrapped the idea. There were tons of other emo-looking boys posting videos to YouTube who were much more interesting than he was, and the camera had gathered dust in his wardrobe ever since.

Before he could talk himself out of it, he stuffed it into his bag. Once he was satisfied with his packed bag, he slipped into bed. He was restless thinking about the impending trip, and he was still awake when his parents came upstairs and closed the door of their bedroom. He tried to focus on Phil, his soothing voice that had obviously calmed him as a preteen, and eventually, he drifted into sleep.

* * *

Dan stayed in bed until he heard both of his parents leave the house, not wanting to give his parents any inkling of what he planned to do. He’d shelled out extra money to rent a car with GPS, which, although he hated to spend the extra cash, he knew he’d be needing. Dan was lucky he could navigate Wokingham without a map.

He’d been driving for twenty minutes when he remembered he was supposed to be working, and that remembrance was almost the spark that sent him turning around back home, but he reasoned with himself. He was leaving his job in two weeks anyway in preparation for uni. Once he went to uni, it was very unlikely he’d ever find himself working in another shop, so he probably wouldn’t need to give them as a reference. So, no one would ever find out that he’d given absolutely no notice to the fact he was quitting his job two weeks early. A laugh escaped Dan’s mouth. He was absolutely awful at retail jobs. He’d sold an axe to a child who was actually a secret shopper. He’d hit the panic alarm at his next job, sending the entire police and fire force to the store. If the law thing didn’t work, he didn’t have a lot of options ahead of him.

It was right around this time that he noticed the exit to take the motorway east toward London. He was aware that the drive to London would add at least two extra hours to his trip. It had been his plan to stop, but not to stop at cities that were completely out of the way. But he had quite a few friends in London, and he’d like to have something to show for his trip if it turned out Phil was nonexistent. It’d be his last time with his friends before they stuck him into professional care for his obvious mental disorder.

So, he took the exit. He rummaged in his bag on the passenger seat to find his phone, thinking he’d need to secure a place to crash for the night. He scrolled through his contacts, and he found himself stopping on Emily’s name. They had said they were going to stay friends, and if he was being honest, she was the only person he knew living in London that he’d want to stay the night with. While his other friends were good enough to get trashed with, they weren’t necessarily the type of people whose flat you wanted to be inside.

He dialed.

“Hello?” Dan wasn’t sure if the inquisitive sound of her voice was because she’d taken his number out of her phone, lost all of her contacts, or was just shocked to see him calling. He almost decided to hang up.

“Hey Emily. It’s Dan.”

“Yeah, I saw. I was just kind of surprised to hear from you.” So, it was the latter. He still wasn’t sure whether it was the good kind of surprised or bad kind.

“Um, yeah. Sorry, this is totally out of the blue. I just took a spontaneous trip, and I was going to make a stop in London for the night, and I was wondering if you’d want to hang out.” He felt it was best to avoid asking to stay over, at least for now. 

“Yeah Dan. I’d really like that. Do you want me to give you my address?” Her tone had transitioned to something that sounded like happiness. It was happier than Dan had expected her to sound.

“Yeah, that’d be great.” He propped the phone between his shoulder and ear as he entered the address into the GPS. He was glad the motorway was rather empty because he was driving more recklessly than he ever had in his life.

As he was putting his phone back into his bag, he felt the video camera. He took it out and turned it on, surprised it still had any power. With a passing thought about whether it was legal to film yourself while you were driving, he hit the record button.

“Hi. So, my name is Dan. Nice to meet you. And this is my first proper video I guess. I mean I’ve kind of always wanted to be somebody that posts videos but I guess I’ve never really had the confidence or the motivation. But I’ve kind of decided to throw it all to the wind right now, and be a little bit courageous for once in my life. So basically, I just decided to leave home, using money I should be using for uni, and drive up to Manchester.

“Now you’re probably going to think I’m absolutely mental for why I’m going to Manchester. I kind of think I’m mental. My parents  _definitely_ think I’m mental. But anyway there’s this guy named Phil, and I think he used to be my best friend when I was little. But my parents swear to me that he wasn’t real, but I know he’s real. And I know he’s the best person I’ve ever had in my life, and I need to know I’m not crazy. So I’m going to find Phil. 

“I’ll be making some stops along the way, so I guess I’ll kind of stop and tell you about them. If anyone actually even watches these videos…My first stop is actually going to be in London. It’s completely out of the way, but I’m going to see my ex-girlfriend. Probably not my best idea, but I don’t know. I guess there’s part of me that wonders if I’m inventing this whole Phil thing because I just want somebody in my life. And maybe I gave up on me and Emily too hastily. So, we’ll see what happens when I see Emily.

“Well, this was just an introduction kind of. I’m sure my other videos will be a lot more interesting than this one. But I’m going to stop filming now because I’m pretty sure I’m minutes away from being arrested for using this thing while I’m driving. I’ll talk to you again soon.”

By the time he shut off the camera, feeling completely idiotic about what he’d filmed to the point where he felt like vomiting, he was entering London. He took a few wrong turns but eventually made it to Emily’s flat. It then took him about fifteen more minutes to find somewhere to park his car. He wasn’t sure why he felt it was a good idea to rent a car.

He called Emily, never liking to slink around flats he’d never been to, trying to find the right one. Invariably, he’d end up knocking on the wrong door. When she exited the building, she immediately held out her arms to wrap Dan into a hug. Their bodies pressed against each other. Her warmth filled him, and he waited to feel something. He waited for the lavender scent wafting into his nose to fill his stomach with butterflies. But he felt nothing.

* * *

“So I talked with Joey, Lacey, and Vincent, and they said they’d meet us out tonight,” Emily said, entering the lounge area clothed only in a bathrobe and a towel tied around her head.

“Uh huh.”

Dan was too preoccupied with his computer to acknowledge Emily’s words further. He’d hopped onto Emily’s neighbor’s unprotected Wi-Fi network and had been spending the last twenty minutes trying to convince himself to upload his video to YouTube. While waiting for Emily to shower and get ready, he’d managed to make some crude edits on the video, and it wasn’t terrible. In fact, the only reason he was considering uploading it was because he knew he’d seen worse first videos, even from some YouTubers who later became popular. He’d left his cringeworthy account name, danisnotonfire – which he’d used for everything until sometime after he turned fifteen – because he couldn’t think of anything better. Plus, he’d used the username to comment on videos uploaded by his favourite YouTubers, and he was hoping for the possibility of name recognition.

“You want something to drink?”

The question drew his focus away from his computer, and he turned his head towards Emily. He twitched, noticing her lack of actual clothing but managed to disguise it as a stiff neck, circling his head around. “Yes please.”

“Come into the kitchen and pick your poison. And then you can bring it into my room and help me pick out my clothes.”

The video upload would have to wait until later, when he tipsily pressed the upload button before leaving the flat with Emily to meet up with their high school friends. Once they reached the street, Emily grabbed Dan by the hand and pulled him towards their destination. They laughed together the entire way.

The back of the bar was reserved for dancing, which fed perfectly into Dan’s drunken tendency to break into dance. Their friend Joey had brought his girlfriend, making six of them – three girls and three boys. By default, Emily and Dan were dance partners. Dan tried to ignore the raised eyebrows of the others, who were undoubtedly wondering whether the two of them were getting back together.

Dan hadn’t been that drunk since the previous summer, when someone from his high school had thrown a going away party for all the university bound kids in town. It had also been the last time he’d seen Emily. In the blur of alcohol, Dan started to recall the things he liked about Emily: the way her nose crinkled when she really smiled, the way she could look in Dan’s eyes and seem to know exactly what he was thinking, the way she could talk to anyone without fear and could make any of those people smile. The feelings he hadn’t felt earlier were rising in his chest, especially as their faces got closer and closer, until he could smell the vodka and soda on her breath.

“We should go home,” she whispered in his ear.

It was still somewhat early, only 12:30, and Dan wasn’t ready to stop drinking. He hadn’t realized how lonely he’d been, how desirous he was for a night of having fun until he was doing it. But he didn’t have a choice, so he left with her. It didn’t occur to him to question the winks from Joey and Vincent as he left.

Their walk back to Emily’s apartment was quiet, and Dan wondered if she was feeling sick. That supposition was contradicted almost immediately upon entering Emily’s apartment, when she grabbed onto Dan’s collar and attempted to pull Dan’s lips into hers. Unsteady from the alcohol, Dan couldn’t stop himself from falling forwards toward her, and their lips touched. Dan was guilty of enjoying the touch of another person when he was drinking, and the warmth of her lips was tempting. When he and Emily started dating, the kisses had fire that this one did not, and that their kisses hadn’t for the last months of their relationship. His brain wasn’t so tainted by the alcohol to be unaware that there was no incentive to allowing the kiss to continue. Grabbing Emily’s by the shoulders, he pried her off of him, pressing lightly and affectionately enough as to not insult her with his rejection.

“We shouldn’t do this Em. There’s a reason we broke up…” He rubbed his hand over her shoulder, though he knew it did nothing to soften the blow.

“But what if we were wrong,” she appealed, leaning over to press her lips against his collarbone.

Dan backed away, far enough that Emily could no longer reach him. “We weren’t wrong Em. I’m sorry.” She was still looking at him, lip drooped into a pout, so Dan added, “Plus, I’m into someone else.”

“Oh.” She didn’t say anything else, just retreated to her bedroom.

Dan had periodically suspected that the breakup, although referred to as mutual, was more Dan’s doing than Emily’s. The wrinkles that appeared on Emily’s face when he’d said the words “someone else” appeared to confirm it. He regretted deciding to come to Emily’s, but Dan had needed to know if there was still something between them just as much as Emily had; it just happened that their individual answers to that question were different. More than ever, Dan was eager to get to Manchester. He fell asleep on Emily’s sofa amidst visions of raven coloured hair.

* * *

Quite expectedly, in the morning, Emily and Dan both pretended the events of the previous night had not happened. They linked in an awkward goodbye hug lasting less than a second before Dan left to search for the street he’d left his car on. Sticking with his propensity for appalling navigational skills, it took him nearly half an hour to find his rental, so long that he began to doubt whether he was correct about the type of car he’d rented.

He hadn’t looked at his YouTube channel, afraid of what he would find, but he figured the events of the night before warranted another video. And frequent uploads were what was most likely to gain him viewers, so he started up the camera again. Hopefully he’d never become widely watched enough for Emily to find him.

“So, it’s day two of my road trip up to Manchester, and I’ve already veered completely off course to London. I’m pretty sure this added about 45 minutes to my trip, not including the additional 30 minutes it took to get there, so in all it added over an hour. It was probably an ill advised trip, especially because I decided it would be a  _wonderful_  idea to ask my ex-girlfriend if I could stay with her. And now my ex-girlfriend is a great person, but that relationship was very, very over. But I guess this whole trip to Manchester and the craziness of it, the spontaneousness of it, just had me doubting whether I could really trust my judgment. And I think part of me wanted to see if the relationship was really over. Apparently Emily wanted to know that too. Let it suffice to say that she and I had very different conclusions about that. The good thing is that it’s made me even more anxious to find Phil.

“I’m sure you all – if there is a you all – probably think my fascination with Phil is pretty weird. I had a crush on him when I was 12, and maybe he’s become horribly disfigured at this point. If he is disfigured, I just hope it’s not his…” Dan stopped to peer out the corner of his eye and smirk. “Well, maybe I should keep this channel more kid friendly. 

“So, yeah, I got drunk last night, my ex-girlfriend tried to kiss me, and I, in very un-man-like manner rejected her advances. The resulting morning was worse than the resulting morning of a one night stand. We just didn’t say a word about it and hugged like you’d hug that one old family member who smells like they’re already dead. I’m pretty sure this will be our last attempt to communicate, and any future encounters will be much like the previous time I saw her – when I ran and hid underneath a rack of clothing. You have to remember that she is my only past serious relationship, and we’d broken up like two weeks before…well maybe it was six months… but I didn’t know how you were supposed to handle seeing your ex-girlfriend in a clothing store!

“I just realized I’m really hungry since I obviously wasn’t going to ask Emily for anything to eat, and I have a bit of hangover that needs lots of greasy food before it can be overcome. I probably should drive more than an hour before stopping, but now that I’ve realized I’m hungry…Well, actually I just saw a sign for Oxford. Seems like a good place for the road trip right? My mum actually took classes at Oxford when she was studying, and I don’t think she’s forgiven me yet for the fact that I didn’t live up to my ‘full potential’ and get into a uni like Oxford. Speaking of my mum, I don’t think I’ve mentioned yet that my parents have absolutely no idea where I am. And I didn’t think to charge my phone at Emily’s last night so they probably think I’ve been murdered. If you hadn’t guessed, I’m kind of a terrible person. I don’t know why you’d even be watching this video. So, until next time…”

Dan arrived in Oxford and stopped at a sandwich shop. Noticing the “Free Wi-Fi” sign on the door, he opened his laptop when he sat down with his sandwich. He managed to get a table near an electrical outlet to charge his phone. He plugged in his camera to upload the video. As he watched the video back, he was surprised that he chuckled at some of the things he said. It was uncommon for Dan to have any faith in himself in regards to anything, but he had to admit that he had rather good camera presence. He only made a few edits before he decided to upload up to YouTube, and it was only partly because he didn’t have that much time to waste, as he wanted to do some exploring before he got to driving again.

His visit to YouTube was the first he’d had since he’d uploaded the first video, and he braced himself for the worst when his channel came up. As he should have expected, his first video hadn’t gotten many views, but it had about twenty, with a few likes. It even had one comment that said he was cute, and that person had even subscribed. He couldn’t have hoped for much better, which made uploading the second video a little less scary, and didn’t necessitate liquid courage.

Dan made his way over to the campus of University of Oxford. He was mesmerized by the beauty of it, and for the first time, he regretted not trying a little harder in school. Of course, looking at the students in their collared shirts, tweed jackets, and loafers, he didn’t think he really belonged either.

He decided his exploring time was a good opportunity to call his parents and let them know where he was. Still, he didn’t feel much like talking to him, so he called the home phone, knowing they’d be at world.

“Hey Mum and Dad. I guess you’ve noticed I’m gone by now. I’m on my way to Manchester because I just refused to believe Phil is not real. I’m sorry if I made you worry. I’ll be in touch.”

* * *

When he got back on the road, it was nearing three o’clock, and even if he didn’t stop again before Manchester, he wouldn’t be there until six o’clock. Having only a business address to go off of, he figured he should make another stop to stay over somewhere. Eventually he decided on Birmingham, which would give him a less than a two hour drive in the morning to Manchester. He hadn’t considered that on road trips, one does need a place to stay. He ended up staying at the cheapest hostel he could find, a poor decision, though he lived until the morning to film another video as he drove to his final destination.

“Well, like I said, I stopped in Oxford yesterday. I think everyone there thought I was plotting to steal their secret mathematical formulas, or something. They were all walking around with their books pressed tightly against their chests and with invisible sticks up their arses, glaring at me. To be fair, I was dressed in a black t-shirt and skinny jeans, and besides the fact that I’m virtually a giant, I look about twelve, so I didn’t really belong. I hope all unis aren’t like that because I will never fit in. It was really beautiful though. 

“I stopped last night in Birmingham. I walked around the streets a bit, mostly because I was trying to avoid the hostel I was staying at until the last possible moment. Seriously, I would have been better off sleeping in my car. I’m pretty sure the events of the film  _Hostel_  were based off something that happened at this hostel. I didn’t even want to look at the floor because I was sure there’d be rats running across it. And everyone there was a middle-aged man who looked vaguely drunk and like he might climb in my bed while I was sleeping. I kept all my valuables in the rental car. I wasn’t going to trust any of the food or even the coffee they were offering this morning so I kind of feel like I might pass out, so i probably should stop for some coffee.

“I survived though, and I’ll be arriving in Manchester sometime today. I really hope this isn’t a complete waste of time. I’m kind of nervous that I’m completely out of my mind and there’s going to be no one in Manchester. Also, until right now I never thought of the possibility that I could show up there and Phil does exist but has no fucking clue who I am. Now that would be swell.

“Also, I want to thank any of you who have actually watched these videos, and to the one person who called me cute. I know I’m not that interesting, but it means a lot to get some likes. Sorry I didn’t say this in the last video. I was too afraid to check my channel before I posted the newest video. And I actually haven’t checked my channel since I uploaded that one, so hopefully things have gotten even better since then. But thank you, and I will update you as soon as I get to Manchester.”

Much as he expected, he was exhausted after driving forty minutes, and he knew he had to stop, lest he crash into a guardrail before reaching Manchester. He stopped at a Starbucks, for coffee and for a chance to upload the newest video. He’d gained a few more subscribers and gotten a few more views than last time. He figured that if anything, this development in life had made the trip worth it.

* * *

When the first road sign for Manchester appeared, Dan felt his hands start to slip on the steering wheel, and he again thought he might crash. He checked the GPS, and it said he had eight more minutes until he reached his destination. For those eight minutes, he spent more time watching that number decrease than he spent looking at the road. He pulled up to Lester’s Plumbing, pleased to find it still existed. It was outside the city centre, and he was relieved to finally be able to park in a car park.

It took a few deep breaths, and a good thirty seconds of playing with his hair in the visor mirror before he could bring himself to get out of the car and go inside. He felt more out of place than he had in Oxford, surrounded by toilets and pipes. He felt like the other customers were staring at him, this barely legal guy not even out of his parent’s house perusing the plumbing store.

He walked up to the counter, which was manned by a man about fifty years old, and his nametag read “Roger Lester.” 

“Can I help you?” He asked.

“Um, I’m looking for your son, maybe?”

“Martyn?” 

“No…” Dan considered for a moment how crazy he might sound if Phil didn’t exist before he said, “I’m looking for Phil.”

The man’s face turned a shade lighter at the sound of the name. “Phil…isn’t available. How do you know him?”

Dan’s heart pumped harder in his chest. Phil was actually real. “Well, I mean, I knew him when we were a lot younger, and I just wanted to find out what happened to him. I’m Dan.” 

Dan’s name evoked a new change in colour in Mr. Lester’s face; his cheeks flushed. “You’re Dan? I can’t believe it!”

“You know who I am?”

“Phil used to talk about you constantly. And then…well, maybe you should come in back with me.”

Dan’s skin felt hot. The sad look on Mr. Lester’s face told him that there was no good news to come.

Mr. Lester asked one of his other employees to cover the cash register, and he led Dan into his office. “Sit down,” he said, motioning to a chair. 

“This is a kind of hard thing to say. Phil used to talk about you, and unfortunately we never really believed you existed…”

“Well, don’t worry. My parents never believed me either.”

Mr. Lester turned up the corners of his mouth just barely, but it was the closest Dan had seen to a smile out of him since he’d walked into the shop. 

“He wasn’t very happy when he was a kid, so we just let him talk about you and believe in you for that matter. And then one day, he stopped talking about you, and we didn’t know why. But one day we finally just asked. We thought maybe he’d admit you were imaginary I guess. But instead he just said you were gone, and he wouldn’t talk about it again. 

“After that things got pretty bad. He was getting bullied still, which he’d always been able to deal with, but he couldn’t anymore. He was sad all the time. He barely talked, barely ate. Then when he went to high school, he got involved with some kids who gave him stuff, alcohol, weed. And then the harder stuff came.”

It was clear to Dan that Mr. Lester was trying not to cry as he talked, and he wasn’t sure what he should do. Figuring that touching him would be out of line, he tried his best to look comforting. 

“It was about four months ago we got the call. They found him in the bathroom of some bar downtown. He was unconscious. Heroin overdose. He’s been in a coma since.”

Dan bit down a swear that was threatening to come from his lips. “Is he…will he come out of it?”

“Probably not. We’ve been thinking about whether or not we want to…” Mr. Lester gulped. “Take him off life support.”

Dan felt like he was going to throw up. Phil’s life had spiraled out of control after Dan had stopped talking with him. If he hadn’t been brainwashed by his therapist into forgetting Phil, it probably wouldn’t have happened. He didn’t want to make the horrible circumstances about him though, so all he said was, “I’m sorry.”

“Thank you. So you know, Phil was never happier than when he used to talk about you.”

“Mr. Lester, this is probably asking a lot, but I’m wondering if I could see Phil. The whole reason I came here is because Phil kind of spoke to me again. And he told me to help him.”

“We’ve tried everything else, so I’d be happy to try bringing you into his room.”

* * *

Dan’s fists gripped the steering wheel hard enough to turn his knuckles white as he followed Mr. Lester’s car to the hospital. Throughout his drive to Manchester, he’d never thought about what he would do if he saw Phil, and certainly, he never expected the circumstances he’d walked into. His throat felt coated with phlegm, but no matter how much he swallowed, the feeling wouldn’t go away. He was choked up with a sense of guilt, guilt that Phil’s life had dropped out from under him soon after Dan had “disappeared” on him. It was matched by a renewed sense of anger towards his parents.

It’d been a long time since Dan had visited someone in hospital. He remembered a kid in school got in a car accident and broke some ribs, and the class had gone to visit, but being with a group had eliminated all of the spookiness of being in a hospital. Now, he would be facing a person in a hospital bed who had not been conscious in months. Dan didn’t know what that amount of time lying in a bed with nothing but an IV to provide sustenance did to a body, but he was terrified to find out.

He was more terrified of the outcome if he didn’t see Phil. Mr. Lester had essentially confirmed that all Dan remembered from his childhood about Phil was true, but Dan needed that final step toward acceptance with laying eyes on Phil. He also believed that without seeing Phil, these pangs of guilt inside him would never fully diminish. There was another reason Dan felt so compelled to see Phil, but he tried to push it aside as it was ridiculous. More than likely, Phil would never wake up, and Dan’s presence would never be known to him. But there was this twinkle of hope within Dan. 

He parked next to Mr. Lester’s truck. The deep frown lines on his face seemed to have diminished just in the driving time, replaced by a toothy grin. Coughing, Dan attempted to free the clog in his throat that had become more pronounced. It was evident that Mr. Lester had hopes higher than he should for what Dan’s effect would be.

“We just have to wait a few minutes. My wife is on her way over here too,” he explained.

Dan stared at the ground, kicking a pebble with his toe. “Mr. Lester, I really don’t want you to get your hopes up about this.”

“Oh, don’t worry Dan. I know there’s no guarantee.” The smile on his face conveyed a different attitude. 

When Mrs. Lester arrived, she rushed out of the car and wrapped Dan into a hug, which Dan assumed meant that she was overly hopeful about this situation as well. He felt wetness on her cheek as it touched his.

“I always had this feeling that you’d come back to Phil. There were some nights, when I’d fall asleep in the chair in his hospital room, and I’d swear I’d hear him whisper your name. But the doctors swore that he couldn’t be speaking. But I knew.” 

Mr. Lester placed a gentle hand on his wife’s back. “Now Anne. Give the boy some room. Don’t put too much pressure on him.”

“Oh I know Roger,” she said, wiping tears away from below her eyes. “It’s just that, even if he doesn’t wake up, I will feel so much better about… you know… if he could meet the famous Dan beforehand.”

Dan managed a slight smile, relieved slightly by her words. They walked through the doors of the hospital, the Lesters needing nothing more than a wave to the nurse to gain access to the upper floors. Dan surmised they’d spent a lot of time in the hospital with Phil. Following the Lesters through a maze of corridors, they finally stopped in front of a room. There was no window so Dan couldn’t see inside, but a glance at the chart next to it confirmed for Dan that it was Phil’s room.

Mr. Lester opened the door, Mrs. Lester following him. Gulping, Dan followed as well, made more nervous at the prospect of approaching Phil under the watch of his parents. The preparations Dan had tried to make for viewing the sickly body of Phil did little to numb the pain he felt looking at him. Phil had always been pale, but he was almost transparent, giving his skin the appearance of being blue from all of the protruding veins. Dan felt like he was at a funeral viewing, not in a hospital. A single touch seemed likely to break Phil’s bones, which poked through his thin skin.

After the initial shock, Dan’s instinct was to touch Phil. He looked over at the Lesters, as if to ask permission. They understood and nodded. Dan approached Phil and slid his hand into Phil’s. The warmth of his palm seemed unnatural when contrasted with the look of Phil’s body. For over a year of friendship as children, they’d never been able to touch. Now, they finally could, but Phil would never be aware.

Several minutes passed, but Dan kept his hand in Phil’s, not saying a word. Mrs. Lester pushed a chair over for Dan to sit on when it became clear he wasn’t going to move. He could hear them discussing what they thought he was doing, but Dan did not enlighten them, mostly because he didn’t know what he was doing. When he’d had that initial urge to touch Phil, he thought maybe something magic would happen just at the touch. He thought maybe Phil’s pulse would obviously quicken, that the machine beside him would start beeping. But nothing happened, and all Dan could think to do was to think hard. If touching a pen that Phil had touched could connect them, then touching his body should connect them as well, he thought. So far, it wasn’t working.

Eventually, Dan sighed and let go of Phil’s hand. “I don’t think this is going to work.”

“It’s okay Dan. It was a longshot,” Mr. Lester said.

Dan didn’t dare look at them, but he could hear muffled sobs from Mrs. Lester. He thought that if he looked at her, he’d break down too. Tears already were threatening to drop from the corners of his eyes.

“Do you think I could just be alone with him for a minute?” Dan asked. It felt right to say goodbye to Phil in private. 

“Of course.”

Dan waited until he heard the door to the room close before he grabbed Phil’s hand again. “Phil, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I was brainwashed by my parents and my therapist into leaving you all alone. It’s only because of you I made it through childhood, and then I just abandoned you when you finally needed me. I wish I could have done something.”

Dan reached his hand over Phil’s face, and pushed a lock of his hair up off his forehead. The black hair from Dan’s recent visions was only at the tips now, the hair at the roots closer to the the chocolate colour of his own. He hoped that when they had the funeral, they dyed Phil’s hair back to black. It suited him so well.

It had always been a mystery to Dan how people could kiss the bodies of their deceased loved ones. It seemed so odd, so creepy to kiss a lifeless body, and given Phil’s state, Dan thought he would feel the same with him; but, that wasn’t the case. Those pent up feelings for Phil, feelings that had just been suppressed but never overcome were stronger than ever as he sat beside Phil, as he felt Phil’s skin against his for the first time. Dan leaned forward and pressed his lips against Phil’s.

He held his lips on Phil’s, peace washing over his body, like their lips were meant to touch. Dan only wished the kiss had come seven years earlier. He wished he’d run away from home and hopped a train to Manchester as a twelve year old, his parents be damned. Then they would still have been kissing in that moment, but not in a hospital bed and with their fingers combing through each other’s hair, and with Phil’s lips moving against his and his teeth pulling on Dan’s bottom lip.

When Dan felt Phil’s lip twitch, it fed into his fantasy, and it wasn’t until the monitor next to him started beeping that he returned to reality. He pulled away, as the monitor showed Phil’s heart rate increasing, watching as Phil’s eyes began to twitch and finally opened no more than a crack.

“Holy shit…holy shit,” Dan murmured, grabbing the remote with the nurse’s call button and smashing the button. 

The next moments passed in a fog, as Dan called out to the Lesters to enter the room. They were followed quickly by two nurses, who had to push the two parents out of the way to check on the awakening patient. Dan slinked into a chair by the wall, head in his hands, in disbelief of what was happening. 

The first thing Phil said was “Dan.”

* * *

_“Hello internet! I’ve got someone else here with me in this video!” Dan said._

_From below the view of the camera, a figure popped into view._

_“Hi guys! I’m Phil!”_

_“Yup! Phil is here with me. I found him.” Dan leaned his head onto Phil’s shoulder._

_“It’s about time,” Phil joked, leaning his own head down so it touched Dan’s._

_“Hey, hey. I did save your life, didn’t I?” Dan asked._

_“No,” Phil said, directing his attention towards the camera, as if to convey he was speaking to the watcher. “What this creep did was kiss me as I lay in a coma in hospital, and my body was obviously so disgusted by it that it finally pulled me out of the coma.”_

_“Well, you didn’t seem that opposed to my lips earlier today…”_

* * *

Much to the dismay of Dan’s parents, Dan spent the next two weeks with Phil, helping him relearn the world he’d been away from for months. The time in a coma had allowed Phil’s body to detox from the drugs, but since he was waking up as if no time had passed, the psychological addiction was still strong. Dan stayed close to him as long as Phil’s parents would allow, distracting him from his urges.

Dan introduced Phil to the YouTube world. Phil helped Dan to film some of his videos, one of which was the two of them playing Sonic on Phil’s Sega that Dan had convinced the nurses to let him bring into Phil’s room. Having taken some video production classes in high school, Phil was helpful with editing, improving the quality and output of Dan’s videos. Dan had taken to uploading at least one video a day, which seemed to help his subscriber count grow. Some of his subscribers suggested he get a Twitter account, a suggestion he took, and he began interacting with subscribers through that avenue as well. Soon, he was getting tweets from some mildly successful YouTubers, who began inviting him to meetups and suggesting they collaborate. Everyone was intrigued by the story of Dan and Phil, even urging Dan to bring Phil with him to events. Dan hated to decline, but he explained that he was about to start university, and he needed to focus on that.

For Dan and Phil, they continued almost where they left off. Despite multiple attempts at apologies by Dan, Phil always cut him off, only concerned with the fact that Dan had returned. There was the added romantic element to their relationship, although it had existed under the surface when they were too young to act upon it. Much of the romanticism was initiated by Phil, as Dan was afraid to be a substitute for a true recovery from addiction for Phil. Without a doubt, Dan never wanted to be away from Phil again, but he didn’t want to be a crutch for Phil, knowing he’d have to be away, at least in a physical sense, for months at a time while at university. Phil sneaked many kisses though, and Dan found that he was powerless against Phil once their lips touched.

Their last day together came too quickly. Dan didn’t want to go, especially when Phil would finally be leaving the hospital in two days, but Dan knew well enough from the constant phone calls from his parents that unless he came back home and finished packing, he’d never make it back for his uni orientation. Dan suspected that they wanted him to come home faster so they would have more time to scream at him before he left for uni. Phil and Dan planned to film one more video together, though Dan had been encouraging Phil to film some of his own clips while they were apart.

“Don’t go,” Phil whined. “You don’t even want to go to university.” 

“I have to,” Dan responded, pouting his lip as he laced his fingers between Phil’s.

“Why?”

“Because.”

“You’re not going to make a very good lawyer if that’s your idea of a good defense.”

“Oh, shut up,” Dan said, shoving Phil on the arm. “You do remember that we basically have a psychic connection, right?”

“Yeah, but you’re going to go to university and meet cool people, and you won’t want them to think you’re crazy talking to an invisible person.”

 “You’ll be worth the accusations of schizophrenia.”

Much to Phil’s dismay, they didn’t talk any further about Dan’s future at university. Dan knew “I have to” was a terrible reason to go to university, but from the time he was a child he never felt he had a choice. He had been enough of a disappointment to his parent’s growing up, and he wasn’t interested in disappointing them in his last act of living in their household. Instead of talking, they filmed their video, edited it, and uploaded it, before saying their goodbyes.

The drive back to Wokingham was dreadful. Everything in Dan wanted to grab that pen out of his bag and make Phil appear in his passenger seat, but he figured it wasn’t healthy for them to not be able to live without each other for some bits of time. Dan’s stomach churned thinking about Phil by himself, out of the hospital. They’d talked many times about how Dan didn’t want to go to university, how he didn’t feel like it was helping him fulfill any real purpose in his life, but they’d never turned that conversation to Phil’s life. It seemed too soon to talk about it, but it was something that terrified Dan.  _What would Phil do when he got out of the hospital? Would he want to turn to drugs again?_ Dan had made Phil promise to continue attending a support group for addicts, and he hoped Phil would film some videos or at least help edit Dan’s. But he wanted Phil to have a meaningful life apart from him.

Much as Dan expected, his parents were not happy about his “wasted” time for those three weeks. Even though Dan knew it was unlikely he’d get an apology about Phil from them, he’d still been somewhat hopeful. In his depleted mood from leaving Phil and driving three hours, he didn’t try to argue. He exerted the last bits of his energy to pack up the rest of his belongings.

Dan was ready to shut off the rest of the world for the night, but with his new YouTube popularity, he had admittedly become addicted to checking the views on his new videos. There was a new message for him on his channel.

“Holy shit,” Dan muttered.

It was from YouTube.

_“Hello Dan!_

_We’ve noticed your account danisnotonfire has become popular in the past few weeks. We were wondering if you would consider starting a partnership with us! This would allow you to earn money while making videos. We don’t expect you to make a decision based just on this message, so we’d like to invite you to visit our headquarters in London. Please let us know if you’d like to set up an appointment!_

_YouTube.”_  

It was the early hours of the morning, but Dan couldn’t think of anything else to do but grab the pen from Lester’s plumbing and talk to Phil. All of his remaining energy he channeled into thinking Phil’s name over and over, hoping he’d wake up.

“God damn you were screaming at me in my sleep,” a groggy Phil said as he materialized in front of Dan, rubbing his eyes.

“I’m not going. I’m gonna come back up to Manchester. I’ll get an apartment and a part time job and I’ll…”

“Hold on Dan. You know I was kidding, right? I want you to be with me so much, but not at the expense of your future.”

“No, Phil. YouTube is partnering with YouTubers. I could start making money by making videos. They want me to visit their headquarters.”

“Dan, that’s amazing!” 

“And I can defer my acceptance to uni. That way if it doesn’t work out, I can always go back. But fuck this. I don’t want to go into law. I want to make videos…”

Phil rested a hand on Dan’s knee, and Dan could swear he felt it, even though it wasn’t possible.

Dan wanted to kiss him, but he was definitely sure that wouldn’t work. He’d have to settle for waiting a few more days. For then, he could just say, “And I want to be with you.”


End file.
